How Sanctions Kill More Than Wars

In the West, sanctions are often framed as a more humane alternative to armed conflict. But looking at their research, they are anything but peaceful. Findings recently published in The Lancet reveal that U.S. and EU sanctions have caused an estimated 38 million deaths since 1970, far exceeding the casualties from conventional war. Far from being simply "instruments of diplomacy," sanctions function as weapons against human life.

Take sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s. As a result of U.S. sanctions, the population severely lacked access to medicine, clean water, and electricity, causing hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths from malnutrition. When asked about the reported deaths, U.S. Secretary of State Albright replied that "the price is worth it." This statement, while cruel when put in clear words, symbolises the moral bankruptcy of our sanctions policy.

More recently, Venezuela paints a clearer example. The Center for Economic and Policy Research found that as a result of U.S. financial sanctions, healthcare systems collapsed, and life-saving imports were blocked. As a result, more than 40,000 Venezuelans died in a single year. This is the result of a system that directly chokes access to life-saving items.

This cruelty of sanctions has long been present on Capitol Hill. A U.S. State Department memo from 1960, describing our sanctions on Cuba, explained that the sanctions aimed to "bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government." Hunger has never been an "unintended consequence," but rather an objective to destabilize countries. Sanctions have become a form of modern warfare to kill silently.

Sanctions are especially deadly because of their control over the economy. The dominance of the USD and the Euro over international payment systems gives Washington and Brussels the capacity to exclude entire countries from global trade. This monopoly ensures that sanctions have the largest impact in the Global South, where dependence on Western financial systems is the deepest. Basic technology, such as cloud computing, is weaponized to punish dissenting nations.

This moral failure doesn't even come with political success. Sanctions only succeed in changing state behavior less than 20 percent of the time. Instead, sanctions fuel black markets, devastate citizens, and entrench authoritarian dominance. In countries like Iran, where sanctions target financial and oil sectors, only the wealthy can find ways to get around sanctions, while ordinary civilians face shortages of life-saving medications and rising inflation

If policymakers in the West claim to care about "democracy and human rights," sanctions expose how hypocritical these statements are. These acts of collective punishment should be treated as indistinguishable from collective punishment discussed in the Geneva Conventions. The policy doesn't affect morals, but 21st-century imperialism.

If we care about opportunities to live in the South, the solution lies in creating trade agreements, investing in technological infrastructure to decrease Western reliance, and creating independent payment systems. China shows this is possible, the development of a software named CIPS as a rival to the Western-backed SWIFT system shows that a multipolar system may be starting.

Ultimately, our moral imperative is clear. We should not stand up for sanctions that kill more people every year than mobs, no matter how much their language is delivered. To defend human rights around the world, dismantling the oppressive regime of sanctions must be the start.